GAZA (Palestine Foundation Information Center) Since it resumed its genocidal war on the Gaza Strip on March 18, Israel has been killing over 103 Palestinians and injuring 223 more every day, the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor said in a new statement issued on Wednesday.
Since dawn on Tuesday, March 18, the Israeli occupation forces have killed 830 Palestinians and injured 1,787 others in hundreds of airstrikes, artillery shellings, and fire from military vehicles and drones throughout the Gaza Strip, according to the Euro-Med field team.
The Israeli occupation army still bombs houses while the occupants are inside, killing large numbers of people. The most recent incident killed eight Palestinians, including five children, when it bombed the al-Najjar family’s home in Jabalia, northern Gaza, at dawn today.
Without any military justification, the occupation army has made it a daily crime to target homes—or what is left of them—and the tents where civilians have sought safety following more than 18 months of genocide. Instead, it is a component of a systematic policy that aims to kill people, ruin their lives, and impose a terrible reality that makes it impossible to survive.
The Israeli army also killed civilian government officials in administrative positions, including supervisors in the education sector. The victims included Jihad al-Agha, the head of the Supervision Department at the East Khan Yunis Education Directorate, who was killed in an airstrike targeting his home on March 23 along with his wife, child, and three daughters, and Manar Abu Khater, the Director of Education in East Khan Yunis, who was killed along with two of his sons in an Israeli airstrike on Khan Yunis on March 24.
The Euro-Med said that an individual does not lose their civilian status or become a legitimate target for attack simply because they hold administrative or civilian positions within governmental or organizational structures, unless they are actively and consistently engaged in hostilities, which is not the case in the aforementioned situations.
According to testimonies given to Euro-Med, the occupation forces shot civilians while they were trying to escape, leaving their bodies lying in the streets. Around 50,000 civilians are still confined to a small geographic area while Israeli military activities, such as shelling, bombing, and raids, are taking place.
For the 2.3 million people who now face daily killings and starvation policies due to the closure of crossings and the denial of aid and medicine, Israel’s return to widespread killing and systematic destruction of buildings and property, similar to what it did for more than 15 months prior to the ceasefire, imposes a catastrophic reality on their lives. This intensifies genocide policies by enforcing increasingly lethal living conditions that result in slow and gradual death.
In just one week, over 200,000 people have been forced to leave their homes, and thousands more are still getting ready to leave and looking for temporary housing while basic services and security are still unavailable across the Strip.
The Euro-Med concluded by calling on all countries to take responsibility for their legal obligations and act quickly to halt the genocide in the Gaza Strip.
The Palestinian civilians there must be protected in every way possible, the blockade must be lifted completely and immediately, the movement of people and goods must be unhindered, all crossings must be opened without arbitrary conditions, and effective measures must be taken to protect Palestinians from the forced displacement and slow killing plans, it concluded.
